Posted
by
msmash
on Friday May 19, 2017 @04:40PM
from the vine-is-back dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you had a Vine account, there's an alert you may want to know about. The video app, which Twitter bought in 2012 and shut down last year after its six-second videos failed to take off, sent out emails to some users Friday alerting them to a vulnerability in its service. Yeah, that's right, Vine is dead, but your account may have been compromised anyway. Apparently, the "bug" potentially exposed email addresses to hackers or other "third parties under certain circumstances." The vulnerability apparently existed for less than 24 hours, or 14,400 Vine videos. "We take these incidents very seriously, and we're sorry this occurred," Vine wrote in its email. It also said the information exposed could not be used to access accounts, and there were no indications any of the data had been misused.

Exposure of email addresses just isn't that big a deal. You should in most circumstances be operating under the assumption that email addresses are not private to start with. Nevertheless, this is exactly the right response by Twitter by promptly alerting people. I'm not a fan of Twitter at multiple levels, but this seems exactly correct from both a security standpoint and a PR standpoint.